Tag Archives: volunteering

Tracks of two visits to Okopowa St. Cemetery

Learning from Okopawa St.

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I’ve had a lot to write since visiting the Okopowa St. Jewish Cemetery a few weeks ago, but have too busy to put it all together. After my first visit hours after arriving in Poland that Sunday, I wrote my initial thoughts in Practical suggestions when photographing cemeteries. I visited a second time a few days later on Wednesday and I wanted to share my thoughts on that visit, and what I’ve had time to think about since returning from Poland.

GPS Mapping

The first thing I wanted to discuss is the idea of using GPS to help map the sections of a cemetery. While the Okopowa St. Cemetery has several maps, once you’re on site, they’re only useful in a general sense. It would be amazing if there could be an app that would show you which section you were in on a moving map. In my earlier post I showed an overlap on a satellite image of where I walked on the first day, which was densely packed in Section 1, and then a walkabout around the cemetery.

On the second visit, I photographed more of Section 1, which you can see in this new map:

Tracks of two visits to Okopowa St. Cemetery
Tracks of two visits to Okopowa St. Cemetery

The original path from Sunday is shown in dark blue, and the second path from Wednesday is in light blue. This is a close up showing just the part of Section 1 I visited. There is overlap, and you can see I photographed gravestones to the right of the original area, as well as to the left. All of this is still Section 1 in the cemetery. Continue reading Learning from Okopawa St. →

Get ready to photograph – The Okopowa St. Project begins

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As the Okopowa St. Project is about to begin, I wanted a way to help coordinate efforts and share experiences. While each section has a discussion group within Flickr, until now I didn’t have a single group that was easy for people to discuss the project. I’ve now set up a Facebook group for that purpose. If you are participating in the project, or even just thinking about it, please join the group and the discussion.

Also, I’m happy to announce that after discussing things with BillionGraves, we’re going to be able to extract the images from BillionGraves and make them available, even if you don’t separately upload them. This means that even if you only photograph using the BillionGraves app, and don’t manually upload the photos to Flickr, we’ll still be able to get them and make them available.

There’s a catch, however, and that’s the reason we did this, which is that BillionGraves doesn’t embed the geocoding in the images, either the ones they upload or the ones they save to the camera roll. The images are also shrunk when uploaded, so those images won’t be full quality. Therefore we still need you to register on the project on the Google Sheet, so we can figure out which sections each photograph goes to. If you can save the images to your camera roll on iPhone (or use the Android Widget feature which allows you to both upload to BillionGraves and save the photo to your camera), and then upload them to Flickr, we will still end up with better quality images for everyone, and it will make the process much easier on the backend.

We’ve also set up a registration page with BillionGraves, that lets them know you’ve come in through this project. If you haven’t signed up with BillionGraves yet, then please do so through this link. If you’ve already registered on BillionGraves, then just go to the page and sign-in through the ‘Login’ link at the bottom.

Okopowa St. Project BillionGraves registration page

Just to be clear, I am very grateful for the assistance BillionGraves is providing us, and their accommodating our needs for this project. We have no financial relationship. I only started speaking to them after the project was announced, when someone assumed I had coordinated this with them and was somehow benefitting from it. I thought to myself that while I have no interest in benefiting from this project, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to coordinate with BillionGraves since we were going to be using their software. They really couldn’t have been any nicer, and I am hopeful we can build on this relationship in the future as we use the knowledge gained in photographing this first cemetery, into starting more projects to do the same in other cemeteries.